- Two months into a new era of protecting catchers, the rules seem to be working. Catchers are not getting "blown up" in collisions, in baseball's colorful parlance. They are finding ways to tag runners. The game has not been altered significantly.

The just-concluded Giants-Cardinals series featured two catchers-turned-managers, Bruce Bochy and Mike Matheny, who championed this significant change.

Bochy understands the effects of home-plate collisions, having lost Posey to a serious injury in 2011. Matheny even more intimately understands the destructive effects of concussions (caused by collisions or foul tips), since they ended his career.

Matheny figures the grumblers can keep grumbling, but baseball cannot go back to the way it was.

"I think the league has done a nice job of at least moving in the direction of taking it out of the players' hands," Matheny said. "We've got too much information. There's too much to lose for a player with the long-term health effects."

A good tag play at the plate can be "just as exciting for our fan base" as a runner-catcher collision, Matheny said.

Still, Matheny believes the new rules are still somewhat fuzzy and favors changes that would remove the decision from the catchers even further.

At issue is whether catchers can block the plate once they have the ball in hand. As it stands, they can.

"Right now there are a lot of different ways to interpret it, and there's still that flexibility," Matheny said. "If the catcher wants to stay there, he's going to get planted."

Matheny would like to see all plate-blocking outlawed unless it cannot be avoided - namely, when the catcher has to move in front of the runner to get the throw.

Matheny might be one of the bigger proponents of collision avoidance. Like Bochy, he has a catcher (Yadier Molina) who plays a big part in the offense. Also like Bochy, Matheny ordered his catchers not to stand in harm's way and preached the value of a swipe tag long before baseball made it law.

As a manager responsible for winning games, though, Matheny is loath to give away runs by not taking full advantage of a loophole. If a Cardinal is racing home and the opposing catcher blocks the plate with the ball in hand, Matheny said, "We're going to take him out."

Hunter Pence would do just fine under Matheny's dictum because he feels the same way.

"I'm going in hard. That's it," Pence said. "As a runner you have to make sure you go in hard because the catchers are going to be jumping in late. You have to imagine his leg is there, even if it's not there."

Pence participated in spring-training discussions with baseball officials Joe Torre and Tony La Russa when the rules were being honed. Pence's concern, shared by other players and their union, was runners pulling muscles or worse reacting to catchers who suddenly have the ball and block what had been an open path to the plate.

If any such injuries have occurred, they have not been publicized. Although the rules might be adjusted next season to address that, none of the skeptics' concerns have materialized over the first two months of 2014.

Catchers are not getting "planted," and the nature of games has not changed radically.